‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.—Kafka

March 17, 2008

the decline of english

There's a whole lot that's right in William Deresiewicz's review / jeremiad in The Nation focused on the ill health of the discipline of English circa now in the US. But don't get me wrong - there's a lot that's way off in the piece too. Let's start with the way off. Speaking of the MLA job list, he takes us on a tour of the silly stuff they're listing nowadays, finally landing in the seemingly safe space of American lit, which is, "well, literature" at least.

When we [get to the literature positions] we find that the largest share of what's left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. "Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures." "Postcolonial emphasis" is "required." "Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable."

This is an old story, but let's stop for a moment to consider what the many ads like the last one, for a tenure-track position in twentieth-/twenty-first-century American fiction, actually mean. They mean that you can be a brilliant young scholar, from a top program, but if you're an expert in Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, or Malamud, Bellow and Roth, or Gaddis, Pynchon and DeLillo, or all of them plus Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Mailer, Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, Burroughs, Updike, Chandler, Cheever, Heller, Gore Vidal, Cormac McCarthy and God's own novelist himself, Vladimir Nabokov, plus Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, but not in African-American or ethnic American fiction, then there are a lot of jobs you just aren't going to get. And there weren't that many jobs in American fiction to begin with. Graduate students aren't stupid, not even in practical terms, not anymore. So nearly everyone is studying at least some minority literature, and everything else--not the totality of what's valuable in twentieth-century American fiction but certainly the preponderance of it--is getting studied a lot less.

The overall focus on the piece is on the decline of English enrollment and the corresponding efforts to adapt to the crisis on the part of the faculties themselves. Later in the piece, we get the big payoff line "the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers." But I'm pretty damn sure that increased emphasis on formerly-marginal groups / literatures has anything at all to do with declining enrollments - probably the opposite is closer to the truth. Given the choice between Morrison and Chaucer, or say Flannery O'Connor over Cormac McCarthy, I'm not sure the students wouldn't pick the former in either case.

This move on Deresiewicz's part feels like consummate culture wars base-touching, like he's filling out the form that a venue like The Nation require those who would write on the literary humanities to complete before proceeding to other issues and arguments. (Why The Nation, ostensibly a left magazine, would implicitly condone or even require this sort of move is a long, long story, and one that is bound up with both micro-histories of the long standing academy vs. grub street turf war that has been going on in NYC for a long time as well as macro-histories of the anti-intellectualism of the American journalistic left... More on this another day...)

To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they're trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: "Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies"; "literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture"; "visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies." The items on these lists are not just different things--apples and oranges--they're different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions--apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism--whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children's literature, even in something called "digital humanities."

It is a bit difficult not to wonder how Deresiewicz's own current project avoids the trap of trendiness that he's describing...

My current project is Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston. The book draws on fiction, film, television, poetry, and other arts, as well as on insights from the social sciences, to trace the impact of modernity on the ways that friendship has been imagined and practiced in Great Britain and the United States over the past two centuries.

Look, more power to him, but the title sounds exactly like the sort of course listing that people run to boost student numbers, especially at elite places where numbers really can matter on a course by course basis. Theme X: From Canonical Text Y to the Simpsons. Or was it Buffy? Depends. (Funny to think that he couldn't really call it from Jane Austen to Friends, so Dame Jennifer gets the main billing...) We used to joke that adding the Simpsons to a course description would boost enrollment 1000%. And we joked this way because it was absolutely true. A class on satire that would draw 30 turned into a giant lecture with a squad of TAs if you showed cartoons on the first day of class.

The rest of the piece largely avoids this sort of thing, thankfully, and successfully delineates some of the real issues facing English today. This, for instance, is for the most part right:

What's going on? Three things, to judge from their absence from Graff's history, that have never happened before. First, the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.

In other words, the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers. This is also unprecedented. However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession's internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.

Graff's critical movements were proud, militant insurgencies, out to transform the world. This year's Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It's not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star--a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom--emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the "conflicts" still exist, but given the larger context in which they're taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

Now first of all, and while I only have the evidence garnered from my time in a few different English departments over the last ten years as well as the ambient stuff that goes around, he's absolutely right about the declining enrollments. The department (big research 1 state institution) where I worked until recently is in full-on panic, as they've lost half. As far as I know, the place where I did my graduate work (a peer institution to Deresiewicz's current place) is having the same sort of trouble that he describes. And there is absolutely no doubt that the worsening economic conditions - and in particular, the increasing anxiety that college-aged students feel when it comes to the job market that they anticipate entering - has a lot to do with this pattern.

But I can't help but feel that there's something else going on with the declining enrollments as well. After all, just as it's never the wrong time for the Bush administration to push tax cuts (economy goes up, and the government has too much of "your" money; it goes down and its time for some cleansing stimulus), I'm not sure it's ever been the right time to sign on for an English major. I don't have the figures at hand, but it seems to me that there were good reasons in the 90s... and the 80s... and the 70s... and the 60s... to look for a more efficiently marketable degree.

In other words, to my mind, there are other issues here that inform the change beyond what I think Deresiewicz is trying to establish to be a self-reinforcing cycle of faculty desperation and the watering down of the course offerings. I wish I had time to go fully into all of them, and maybe I will in a future post. Just quickly for now: there's the way that however valuable historicism is a scholarly stance, it tends to fall relatively flat in the classroom. I say this as a historicist, a part historicist, myself: given equivalent teaching quality, the students will be hooked by the magic tricks you can perform on The Waste Land via vulgar decon and/or new critical torque far faster than they will by the status of the industrial society in Victorian Britain and the way that it informs Hard Times. There's much more to be said about this, of course, and I will soon... Beyond this, intellectual fadism and the mal-distribution of teaching emphasis probably doesn't help either. There are other factors, some of which Deresiewicz touches on - the farming out of intro classes to part time workers, the soft condescension of letting everyone do creative writing, and so on...

But there's one important issue that I do want to focus on here - and it is one that, for reasons hinted at above, obviously wouldn't make it into Deresiewicz's piece. Take a look again at the timing of the decline as described in the piece:

In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year.

(snip)

It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990.

Deresiewicz has all the pieces of the puzzle on the board, they just need to be put together. The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I'm mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn't much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn't a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I'd mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on "liberal bias" were front and center in the news.

I went to grad school during the last days of theory. We started out in our first years with Derrida seminars and ended scrambling to become textual materialists. It became gauche (!), by the end, to go on about Lacan or Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze. But I also got my first tenure track job in the years of the "war on terror." True to form, true to my academic generation, I am a leftist who apologizes for mentioning Iraq in passing during my classes on Conrad, and who probably advances better critiques of Marx than appreciations of him. Such was the ideological weather on the day I was born to the professoriate - and it's grown to feel like the way the weather is supposed to be, has always been. There are times when I can tell that the students don't want me to pull my punches, but I inevitably do.

I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major. The politics may have been largely imaginary back before the fall of theory, but the ethos of radicalism was perhaps hugely more attractive than, say, learning about the fruits of some very solid and largely uncontroversial archival work that your teacher is involved in. Perhaps we as a discipline were just holding off the inevitable by becoming, for so many years, the defacto home of left politics in the academy. But it is worth noting, now that the politics have receded and with them the student numbers, that something we were doing was working. And it is further worth noting just how hard it is for us to admit what it was that was different just before the numbers dropped.

We are, in sum, left in a tough, but not impossible situation.... More to come, I promise...

18 Comments

It's funny he mentions economics as one of the practical disciplines career-minded students are flocking to. Economics departments have the same kind of angst about declining enrolments and career-minded students going to more practical disciplines like marketing: e.g. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAO/is_3_23/ai_n6201941

I feel the same impulse to pull one's punches, sometimes, but there's pulling one's punches and then there's pulling one's punches. I don't see it as my mission to evangelize to my students, and I (hope I) don't—but treating college students as if they need to be hermetically sealed off from all politics, as if these issues aren't in fact the air that they (and we all) breathe, is decidedly deluded. The classroom—especially the humanities seminar—should be the space where political and ideological issues can be brought out, problematized, and wrestled with; it's the space in which, among other things, students learn how to ask the questions they already have and where to start looking for the answers.

I don't see any reason at all to apologize for mentioning Iraq during the study of Conrad, as C.R. says he does; in fact it's rather hard for me to imagine how you'd be able to read and discuss Conrad in 2008 without saying the word "Iraq" and I don't see why you'd want to. These are college students, not children; it does everybody involved a disservice to pretend that we're all just in it for the aesthetics.

It's true that the purpose of academic study of literature and culture is not and should never have been about building new leftists. But encouraging people to think critically about the world in which they live will, fairly inevitably, encourage students towards a more leftist politics, as it always has—and there's no reason for us to shirk from that.

I linked to think and commented more here. Great post. Send it to The Nation.

It seems to me Deresiewicz is right on target, except for inexplicably omitting reference to the several excellent histories of higher education--such as Bill Readings's or Terry Eagleton's--that might have helped him and his readers. Certainly CR might want to take a look at one.

Clearly, 9/11 has virtually nothing to do with the state of college English and the humanities generally. The change is most assuredly real, and its story is overwhelmingly one of commodification--which is not necessarily to say that this story is a tragedy.

What I find myself missing with the decline of older forms of literary research is not ready access to excellent scholarship on canonical works and authors (existing ones mostly suffice) but the disintegration of the body of methodological knowledge itself. As we shift toward studying other media and "culture" more broadly, much of the sophisticated critical equipment invented in literary studies is both forgotten and reinvented ad hoc, often quite inelegantly. Film scholars, now fully in the swing of the historicist turn, seem utterly incapable of analyzing the rhetoric of film narrative--indeed, many haughtily dismiss the whole enterprise as a passé curiosity they have left behind. The result is a swelling literature on movies often laughably oblivious to what its critical objects are constructed to do.

So for me the problem is less with the "trendy" new object domain (I myself would much rather read Morrison than Chaucer) than with the newly journalistic protocols of reading--or, in effect, non-reading. (Butler, BTW, is a pretty good reader of philosophical texts, but she's inspired a deluge of moronic readings of literary and visual artifacts.)

As for commodification, it has been long in the making. CR is dead wrong that things remain largely as they were in the 50s, since the 60s mark the end of higher education as the preserve of the leisure classes. At least until the G.I. Bill--and a bit past it--college was a gateway into the adult part of the elite world into which most students had been born. Its practical function was to bestow the cultural literacy and social capital required for life in that world. Today, by contrast, colleges bestow credentials, which need not correspond to any actual knowledge gained in acquiring them. This is not necessarily a criticism; it is regrettable only if one assumes that cultural capital of a certain sort is intrinsically, rather than functionally, valuable. Not what a card-carrying materialist should precipitously assert.

Accordingly, we've altered the rationale (i.e., sales pitch--it always was one) for what used to be called "liberal" education: we now claim to equip students with "critical skills" that enhance their capacity to recognize (political--is there another kind?) charlatanism more readily. The irony is that such skills actually require a fair amount of dedication to acquire; they cannot be delivered by way of a syllabus featuring "The Simpsons"--as I repeatedly find myself discovering! Marx championed the uneducated proletariat, but he'd mastered Aristotle and Hegel. As a child, Lenin spoke seven languages around his family dinner table. As an adult revolutionary, he wrote volumes upon volumes of--what else!--theory. It is certainly not in a cultural sense that their materialism was "vulgar."

Typically, the argument against erudition of this sort asserts that all this intellectual sophistication did not prevent Lenin and many others from spilling the blood of innocents in the street. As a former Young Pioneer who once paraded on those streets, I can only agree. But the flip side might be that there is a radicalism available only through a certain erudition, a certain apprenticeship that cannot simply be packaged and delivered along with proof of purchase. A truly democratic education must not only be extended to all; it must actually educate them. So what's the sales pitch for unpredictable, laborious and irreversible transformation of the self?

That's interesting, isn't it. Not sure what to make of it, other than to guess that economic may be suffering from the same sort combined threat from instrumentally-minded student bodies and disciplinary sclerosis that we're talking about here.

GC -

Thanks again!

Michael -

Hmmm.... Commodification has a lot to do with it, I agree. But do you work in the business? If you do, I would be surprised if you hadn't noticed a change in tenor, in openness, after the attacks / the rise of the strong backlash against dissent.

CR is dead wrong that things remain largely as they were in the 50s, since the 60s mark the end of higher education as the preserve of the leisure classes.

Um, look back at my post. Where do I say that things were the same in the 50s?

But the flip side might be that there is a radicalism available only through a certain erudition, a certain apprenticeship that cannot simply be packaged and delivered along with proof of purchase. A truly democratic education must not only be extended to all; it must actually educate them.

I agree with all this. And I agree that university conditions have changed. But it simply is not the case that the university is still offering this sort of apprenticeship, but that the economic structures of the institutions don't permit its dissemination. It's a both/and situation. Economics of the university / crisis of directionality in the departments - both at once, both related to one another, but since I work on the classroom side of the game and no one asks me for management insight, I am thinking through that side of the game.

Great post. I sense that the "crisis in the English Department" is more of a symptom of what could be called institutional melancholy than any reality. The loss of the "literary" was made up--at least for a moment--with the advent of academic stardom (which carried the guise of "theory"). When the academic stars started fading away, suddenly we're in crisis.

The literary academic has no object cathexis--it certainly can't be a bunch of incoming freshmen who want to look over a bunch of Harry Potter books again and again (not that there's anything wrong with that). Pop culture's only sexy when you have a hip celebrity directing your actions and reminding you that you are really studying marginalized forms (or groups) and that, thus, your work has a political--if not literary or spiritual--meaning. You aren't really studying comic books, in other words, you are studying radical forms of queer expression. But without that turn towards a new object cathexis, self-hatred and nihilism quickly sets in.

This post, in fact, has several intersections with my essay on Benjamin's death a few months ago. I suggested there that the advent of the "theorist documentary" reflected a purely archival function for theory--that we are no longer interested with theory and must focus instead only on the history of theory. The history of theory is, thus, not Oedipus (as Deleuze says, the history of philosophy is the Oedipalization of philosophy) but is perhaps the Thanatos to theory's Eros.

What I find incomprehensible about the article is how nakedly Deresiewicz longs for the days when a twentieth century specialist didn't have to read anything but white writers. I can't think of a more charitable selection criteria for the list of writers he rattles off (the "if you know all these people you still can't get a job" list) than the fact of their whiteness, and given that, his basic complaint boils down to the fact that you can't get a job in twentieth century American if you ignore every writer of color. I find that a remarkable statment of principle; is there any reason for Ralph Ellison or Toni Morrison to not be on that list other than not being white, for example? I mean, I would seriously like to believe that he's *not* implicitly arguing that non-white writers are, as such, relevent *only* as minority writers (and not as Americans). But that seems to me what he's saying. I simply can't believe that Deresiewicz would forthrightly make that argument, but if he's asking whether a person who's never read a single African-American writer should get a job teaching twentieth century American literature (and that seems to be the scenario he's set up, doesn't it?), then the answer is obviously no. Absolutely not, they shouldn't. Is that really an issue? Its shocking to me that, whether or not he really means it, he actually implies that such a person should even be considered.

I would seriously like to believe that he's *not* implicitly arguing that non-white writers are, as such, relevant *only* as minority writers (and not as Americans).

That's precisely the level of racialist reductivism that he's arguing against: Don't read these books, or admire these stylists, unless it's within the framework of 'literature of the other' (y'know, because 'white' people are all the same). Doesn't "particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group" imply that these literatures are not to be seen as part of a literary tradition, but instead some sort of supplement (the missing piece and/or the added one) that gets tacked on to the real literary canon? Ellison, say, gets pigeonholed as such a supplement because his subject/perspective is not 'white'. But - he's not a 'black writer,' he's a writer who writes about 20th century America the same way Chaucer writes about Medieval England or Wharton writes about late 19th century urban pseudo-aristocratic New York - that is, from a perspective, with an appreciation for character, as a master stylist. English department culture seems to want to fracture off all otherness to better establish an ideologically unquestioned core, rather than recognizing literature as one big spectrum of perspectives [This relates to neoliberalism's positing of itself as a politics without politics - though I don't currently have time/space to explain how]. It's a determination of who is allowed membership in the group "us," with the recognition that "everyone else" can take a class on literatures by people from their own ethnic groups, and 'white' people are allowed to be dilettantes in other cultures at their whim.

Basically, If you haven't studied Ellison as a black writer towards the understanding of black writers, if he's 'just' another in a trajectory of Chaucer Wharton Fitzgerald Hemingway Nabokov, then you're not getting the job.

well, neither "integrating the canon" nor "recovering the African-American literary tradition" is necessarily a superior strategy; either might be tactically advisable. but--to resolve aaron vs. dave--no such difficult choice need be made re. the deresiewicz article: his long list is carefully chosen NOT to integrate Af-Am, etc, texts into the canon, thus presenting a false binary & denying the possibility of the integration option. point to aaron.

I just don't buy Deresiewicz's premise. Haven't we already gone through the "white literature gets marginalized in English departments" myth enough times already? Did Deresiewicz read Gerald Graff's long discussion of the journalistic tendency to simply assert that Shakespeare was being taught less than Alice Walker, when all evidence suggested the opposite?

Just this fall the New York Times ran a piece "Revisiting the Canon Wars." While the article as a whole lamented the "invasion of politics" brought on by "studying literature through the lens of 'identity'", I was struck by the evidence presented: "In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving 'the Western intellectual heritage.' In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison." So instead of 5 white Englishman and a white American who wanted to be English, now the most-taught writers include three women, one of whom is black! I can see the cause for concern.

I'd like to see an actual break-down of the jobs advertised that Deresiewicz is looking at, because I seriously doubt that literature by white writers is anything but the majority of the offerings in English departments across the country.

English professors are dodo birds. It doesn’t matter who’s on the reading list; the act of reading is still a privilege. How can we expect cultural privilege to extend downward if access does not extend upward? English professors are powerless; they are becoming the most dominated of a dominated class. There are more reasons for this than enrollment: union associations, which discourage open competition and secure and limit jobs using the bureaucratic tool of credentialing; the absurdity of tenure, ensuring an effete ruling class; the aging of the post WWII generation, which is filling colleges not with English majors but with nursing programs; electronics, which has attracted the creative to the most innovative programs. English departments should function more like businesses, just as businesses have learned to adapt and function more like campuses. English departments should recruit from outside. Invite an MBA from AIG to teach "Death of a Salesman." (A contemporary version might cast Willy as an English professor.) There are still those who believe the illiterate should be left illiterate; someone mentioned why the Nation (ad hominem) - the Nation is exactly the right place for the discussion. As Atul Gawande has explained, the med schools are already too late to prepare enough gerontologists to doctor the aging population. English departments are too late to solve their crisis. English professors will have to leave the campus and find a way to get involved in the business community, creating local programs like 826 Writing and tutoring programs, as Dave Eggers has done - quoting from his recent TED prize acceptance: "I wish that you—you personally and every creative individual and organization you know—will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area, and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships." But first English profs. have to be receptive to this idea, and get themselves into the business community. Only then will they get a few more English majors, ones with goals to give back to their business community, avoiding extinction by becoming non-specialized.

Like Nick, I find that what Dave hears Deresiewicz saying doesn't square with what I hear him saying. If he wanted to make that point, then... he would have made that point. But he didn't. He made the point that it is impossible for a person to get a job while studiously excluding non-white writers from their studies, and anyone who would see that fact as a bad thing is someone I find difficult to respect.

I think Dave's point is well taken, though, as long as it's not attached to Deresiewicz. If one wanted to point out the ways that "minority" literature only further ghetto-izes and other-izes writers like Ellison (who very clearly wanted to put themselves in a tradition both black *and* American), then one can make that point, and I think it's fair to think of "whiteness" as a race without race, a la neoliberalism as politics without politics. But Deresiewicz's piece does not display that kind of critical insight into what constitutes white; instead, he simply parades a series of white writers before us, presuming their paradigmatically American status, and (silently) presumes that excluding non-white writers is okay because (as non-white) they don't need to be included. This is a really questionable thing to do, I think.

There are dangers, too, in assuming that African-American writers can simply be called "American" without taking account of how they, or their literary selves at least, are also a product of their othering; the paradox is that one has to consider someone like Ellison as *both* American and not American, because those are the kinds of paradoxes that inform his work, that his work is obsessively consumed with. As Nick put it, "integrating the canon" and "recovering the African-American literary tradition" is a kind of false choice, since you need both if you want to understand what makes the hyphen in "african-american" a meaningful signifier. But talking about these issues takes us very far afield from Deresiewicz's piece, which doesn't display an awareness of any of it(as far as I can see).

Basically you're saying you've become an old fart before your time, because you're too lazy and complacent to read beyond a narrow band of mainly French thinkers, to do the hard yards and reconsider these priceless critical tools and too gutless to say what you mean in class and that's a turn-off, but seeing as you've got enough passengers along there with you, you're actually not doing too badly, apart from whining about a few tedious sub-categories to literature.

Now I want you to slap yourself very hard across the face several times, and firmly close that drinks cabinet.